Survey

An Overview of the Survey

a tutoring session at Marquette's writing center

The survey attempts to gather data and narratives on the long- and short-term effects of education and work as a peer tutor and to answer this question: What do peer tutors take with them after graduation? In the initial phase of this research, we have geared the questions to focus on undergraduate tutors.

The survey we offer here has gone through several draft versions that we have piloted with small groups at our three schools (see Introduction). We based the survey on anecdotes we’ve heard from former tutors and on letters thanking us for the experiences and training that have led to career opportunities for tutors. We also incorporated suggestions from those who attended sessions we offered on the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project at conferences.

We designed it with certain criteria in mind:

• To structure questions so they build on one another and lead into one another.

• To offer tutors an opportunity to write reflective replies, not just rank items.

• To gather primarily narratives and reflections and some limited numerical data.

• To keep it as brief as possible, to avoid tiring alumni or having them put it aside for later and then forget it. We also wanted to make it brief enough to allow individual writing center directors conducting similar research to tailor the survey and add a few of their own questions.

• To allow tutors to discuss effects on their personal and family life as well as on their professional life.

• To gather demographic data on the tutors so we can look at differences between long-term effects of tutoring and short term effects.